Saul Bellow Quotes
-
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
-
Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
-
A man is only as good as what he loves.
-
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
-
Conquered people tend to be witty.
-
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
-
"What do women want?" "They eat green salad and drink human blood."
-
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
-
Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
-
Love is the most potent cosmetic.
-
When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.
-
To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.
-
... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.
-
Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.
-
O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.
-
Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.
-
An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.
-
She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.
-
The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.
-
The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
-
...there is no old age of the soul.
-
...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.
-
Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.
-
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.